Karen A. Johnson
Associate Professor
Karen A. Johnson is a social worker and Associate Professor of Social Work whose research is distinguished by its focus on health justice and how social and organizational systems shape health outcomes. Her work examines how structural determinants of health—including racism, medical mistrust, poverty, the criminal legal system, and geographic isolation—create barriers to sexual health and well-being across diverse populations. She examines sexual health equity, HIV and sexually transmitted infection (STI) prevention, and related comorbidities through the lens of implementation science and community-engaged research, with scholarly work that centers on understanding how systemic factors impact health outcomes for justice-involved populations who use substances, with particular focus on the health outcomes of Black women and individuals residing in the U.S. Deep South.
Dr. Johnson has produced works examining how organizational and social systems influence sexual health outcomes, HIV/STI prevention, implementation science, community-based participatory research, and health disparities at the intersection of the criminal legal system with social work and public health. Through her recent NIH K12 award, she has advanced methodological innovation by furthering the use of artificial intelligence and natural language processing in health intervention research. She has also furthered dyadic data analysis approaches that examine how provider-patient relationships—shaped by organizational contexts and social structures—serve as mechanisms for improving sexual health outcomes and prevention medication uptake among Black women in the criminal legal system in the U.S. South.
Through her Health Equities Action Implementation Science Lab (HEAL-Lab), she leads multiple studies examining how systems create or alleviate barriers to sexual health, substance use treatment, mental health care, and safety from intimate partner violence across forensic settings, rural communities, and populations experiencing houselessness.
Dr. Johnson has led three major intervention adaptation efforts, each employing rigorous implementation science frameworks that center how organizational readiness, system-level stigma, and structural barriers impact intervention delivery, while centering the voices of individuals with lived experience as health equity partners.
Dr. Johnson’s research portfolio spans Alabama and extends internationally to the Caribbean. Her work examines how systems shape health outcomes through stigma reduction training for community corrections personnel, sexual health intervention adaptation for rural populations, transportation barrier assessment in Alabama’s Black Belt, violence reduction initiatives, family preservation programs, and trauma-informed interventions for justice-involved youth in Barbados. She is affiliated with the Alabama Rural Research Collaborative for HIV/STI and Other Chronic Diseases Health Equity, which engages in collaborative prevention and intervention research examining how social and organizational factors drive health disparities across the Deep South.
In addition to research, Dr. Johnson teaches courses in crisis intervention, spirituality in social work practice, organizational leadership, and mixed methods research. She is committed to training future social workers and scholars to address health disparities by understanding and intervening on the systems and structures that create them. Dr. Johnson has been recognized with numerous awards including the 2025 NIH National Institute of Mental Health Loan Repayment Award, the 2024 Early Career Faculty Service and Leadership in Social Work Education Award from the Council on Social Work Education, and the 2023 Boston Congress of Public Health, Health Innovator to Watch Award.
Beyond research and teaching, Dr. Johnson holds several key roles and affiliations. She serves as Co-Associate Director of the Implementation and Community Sciences Core at the University of Alabama at Birmingham Center for AIDS Research, is a Visiting Scholar at Yale University’s Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS and maintains an affiliate appointment at Columbia University’s Social Intervention Group. She serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Social Service and HIV/AIDS and on multiple state-level committees addressing HIV, substance use, and criminal justice reform, including the Alabama Department of Public Health Ending the HIV Epidemic Committee and Alabama Department of Corrections Reentry Committee.
Dr. Johnson has over twenty years of experience in sexual health, houselessness, HIV/AIDS, and STI services, including direct service provision, research coordination, and program administration. She completed postdoctoral fellowships in Global Mental Health and Implementation Science at Columbia University/New York State Psychiatric Institute, Health Disparities Research at UAB, and HIV Implementation Science at Johns Hopkins University. This array of training, combined with a deep commitment to serving communities most impacted by structural inequities, compelled her to pursue research that bridges implementation science with health justice. Her work asks essential questions about how social and organizational systems create health disparities, how to adapt and implement evidence-based interventions that address these systemic barriers in under-resourced settings, how to build trust between socially and structurally marginalized communities and healthcare systems that have historically harmed them, and how to ensure that advances in prevention and care reach those who need them most.
In her spare time, Dr. Johnson enjoys spending time with family and her three rescue dogs Socks, Marshall, and Shirley.
